Wednesday June 12th 2002

So sorry for the delay in new entries. With me, the more I leave things, the harder I find it to approach them again.

But there’s more to my reluctance to update than good old lethargy.

When I first started this diary in 1997, when the Internet was in black and white, when you could leave your wife unlocked and still get change from a fiver, online diaries were a comparative novelty. I was even something of a Minor Internet Celebrity by default. But now these things called “web logs” or “blogs” (I do hate that word) are everywhere, and everyone is crying out like at the end of Death Of A Salesman: “ATTENTION MUST BE PAID.”

Before the Internet, people knew full well they were simply one of billions. They just didn’t let it bother them too much. Now, they go to their computers, log on, gaze out at a sea of a billion faces and find out to their horror that the world doesn’t revolve around themselves after all. And it terrifies them.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? And what websites was it looking at? And what kind of day did it have at work? And what did all the trees in all the other forests say about it?

Now everyone is talking and commenting till they are blue in the wrist, armchair experts and desktop columnists to a man. They natter on their mobiles, on their text-messaging and on their blogs, which as far as I can tell are just ergonomic diaries with adverts. I keep thinking about taking the plunge and converting this one to a blog by way of swimming with the tide but faster, but the third-party host feel of them puts me off. And the feeling of subscribing to a sponsored web community, signing up to an “account” (I am allergic to accounting of any sort), where you are invited to link with other “bloggers” and cross-pollinate comments, giving each other virtual high-fives and hollow hugs, REALLY puts me off. I’ll keep things as they are for the time being. I need to keep some way of feeling vaguely disconnected, being as I am from another world.

But I do like this recent development, and spend many enjoyable hours a week reading the web journals of strangers and acquaintances. I’m not telling you which ones, though.

Last night, as part of my continuing lifelong defiance of the laws of nature, I got something for nothing. I attended one of the much-gushed-about, quickly-sold-out concerts by Mr Brian Wilson, the one who once led the group The Beach Boys. This was despite not buying a ticket when they went on sale, because I’m not a big enough fan of The Beach Boys to warrant spending £40 (that I can’t really afford) on a concert ticket. It is a lot of money for a gig, even (as some people said it was) the greatest gig ever. I balk at paying anything over a fiver for anything.

Sold out concerts in London are not necessarily packed out. One reason is that industry guest lists at London gigs are typically huge, and many designated places are left unclaimed, based as they are on the off chance someone terribly important might feel the inclination to attend, along the lines of “Madonna Plus One”. And even the lesser media people are famously fickle anyway, asking for a guest list place, then feeling a bit fragile on the night and plumping for a date with the telly.

Another reason is that large amounts of tickets to any event with a vague air of popularity become quickly snapped up by hairy-palmed touts of no mother born, in the hope of reselling them for a tidy profit on the streets outside. In this case often £200 each. They do not always succeed. Whether put off by the rain or the touts’ badly judged prices, I heard from reports of previous nights that a fair few tickets remained unused. “Free” is my favourite price for a Brian Wilson gig, so I made my way to the venue with no ticket and, aided by a kind friend who DID have a ticket, sat in an empty seat once the concert had started. The ushers seemed quite happy about this and didn’t bother to check, as long as I didn’t smoke or take a glass bottle in with me.

All those beautiful songs, pretty much ALL of them too, plus the whole of the “Pet Sounds” album performed in full, sounding just like the record, except being recreated live by the main creator himself plus a faultless backing band. Suffice it to say, the show was the best £40 I’ve never spent.